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‘Queen Bee’ is a derogatory League of Legends term in Korea. No, really

We have all heard of the term “boosted animal” in the realm of League of Legends, or any online game with MMR for that matter. With dynamic queue now and pre-made queue before that, there has always been a tendency for those of us who have friends in higher MMR to give us a little bit of help to make the burn of ranked a little less searing.

This phenomenon is present in the Korean server as well, which also gave birth to a very peculiar title that is bandied about quite often online. The term is known as a “Queen Bee,” and before anyone makes conclusions, it has nothing to do with Beyonce.

The insect queen bee is the mother of a hive whose sole objective is to be fed, lay eggs, and mate with the small number of male bees. The rest of the massive hive is made up of worker bees that functionally do all the work for the queen.

The term is used in a derogatory sense and aimed at players, unhappy with their rank, who enlist people with higher MMR to help increase their own rank.

This happens often enough to have its own term in Korea, and there entire threads of posts on Inven, one of the most popular online community sites in Korea. Commonly known as “Queen Bee expose posts,” high-ranking users who have suspicions of a very poor teammate usually goes into the summoner’s profile and checks out their past game history, their past rank, and whether they go into dynamic queue often. If they don’t, they just look at champion play and win rates. When a player usually plays (and loses) as one champion but then starts winning over the course of a couple of days using completely different picks? You probably have yourself a player who’s renting out their account to someone else.

Its oddly very fitting to be compared to a queen bee that does absolutely nothing and only benefits off of the labor of the worker bees around her. I’m sure these types of things will raise their heads as soon as people actually go looking for them, but from what I can tell there isn’t a “callout culture” of such situations.

Unfortunately, the ire in these situations is usually directed at female players. Although the term makes sense referencing the insect queen bee, the gendering of the term is still problematic. Now, its an issue alone that whenever something like this pops up and people immediately assume that it’s a woman, and don’t even get me started with “but they only ever play support” nonsense because I’m a support main. Then again, when self-professed female players boast about their rank on public forums like Inven and then get exposed for renting out accounts or getting continually boosted whenever they drop in rank, it doesn’t really help much to combat this unfair assumption.

The nature of League is that you can always choose to play with more than one good player on your friends list if you’re unhappy with where you are. Although its crossing the line when you have someone else play on your account for the sake of your ego, I don’t see this being an argument to prevent dynamic queue in the form it is right now.

But hey, if you’re low MMR like me, maybe you’re glad with the new dynamic queue.